Monday, July 26, 2010

Lolita (1962)



Ass-Headed Bottom: Well, this is ass-headed, no doubt, but I just didn't like it very much. Sure, I enjoyed watching Humbert Humbert get souplexed in the hospital scene, and Shelly Winter was suitably intolerable as Charlotte Hayes, and I'll admit my... um... pupils dilated every now and again, as when we all visit "Camp Climax for Girls," and during the probably notorious guess-whether-this-is-an-upskirt scene. The above hula-hooping didn't do it for me no matter how sleazily I gazed, however; those are some drab, ill-fitting pants, and it's not like we're seeing any tuchus, and it's not like Sue Lyon was especially young, either. Nabokov's 12-and-a-half set off alarms, rendered Humbert hopeless, and forced satire to keep pace with tragedy; making James Mason ogle a 14 year-old, on the other hand, seemed merely creepy. The perv in the film deserves a long sentence; the wretch in the novel is a wretch for all time.

But I came to this movie too late. Some of Kubrick just isn't aging well for me; of course I'd go to the wall for 2001, Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket (or Tunes of Glory, though I haven't seen it since WWI). But Clockwork and Spartacus and The Shining were films I was proud to be watching at 15--made me feel ahead of my age--but in retrospect they're films for 15 year-olds straight up (as for Eyes Wide Shut, I'm sorry he didn't get the orgy he wanted, but Tom Cruise was already insufferable, and Schnitzler was already ponderous, so zzz...). The climactic Dr. Strangelove himself retrospectively cheapens Sellers' first take on the role in Lolita as "Dr. Zempf." That is,

just isn't

Sorry, Peter: geniuses shouldn't be seen practicing.

The unkindest cut of all, though, was Kubrick's abandonment of Annabel Leigh, the original nymphet of the novel's heartbreaking prologue (follow the allusion and young Hum's heartbreak is doubled in Poe's poem and redoubled in Poe's biography). Tossing away all this, Kubrick instead begins with the novel's end (and ends with the same scene reprised--a clunky loop given Lolita's linear plot). It's an in medias res unworthy of a director so damn good at beginning at the beginning--at the beginning of the world in 2001, for example, at the beginning of the end in Full Metal Jacket.

And alas, I grew up with James Mason as Brutus in Julius Caesar. Now that was a man, and I kept expecting his ho-Humbert to leave off the twee and take on the toga and bowl-haircut of self-divided classical heroism.

Guess I'm a crank. Surely in 1962 Lolita must've raised some cockles among audiences. Long quiescent cockles, I'm afraid. At its best, the penultimate scene--with Humbert sobbing as he hands the barefoot-and-pregnant-suddenly-dowdy-and-bespectacled-still-too-young-stepdaughter-he-has-debauched and loved a bundle of cash so she can elope to Alaska with a guy named Dick, who wears a hearing-aid and calls him "Professor" and "Dad"--well, that's about as fine a satirical bludgeoning of Hollywood conventions as any I've seen. And it's one of the few moments watching this film when I felt again that overwhelming sadness I'd felt upon reading the "the only convincing love-story of our time," as Vanity Fair correctly hyperbolized it.

Slothrop: I've always been erection-deflatingly perplexed about this film, especially since old man Vladimir had his way with the script––don't make no sense, the literalness of the adaptation. Am I wrong in having conceived of Lolita as much closer to a fairy tale than a noir? That if you were the director, you should go for a style that is much closer to Alice in Wonderland than to The Maltese Falcon? But perhaps that's a hidden reflex of the thing, a knock at films that aren't daring (like Nabokov's book and most of Kubrick's films)? But with Kubrick being such a perfectionist of genre? Especially since Nabokov mocks people looking for ideas in stories; it's the style and structure that matters, we learn from Lolita, and that's kinda what's most missing from this film, no? I really don't get this-whatever-it-is, or rather, its raison d'etre. And never saw the more modern day one but assume it tries to be sexy and ends up burping. But that's no raison whatsoever not to get all sorts of hard-ons for Peter Sellers as Chief Inspector Clouseau:


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